The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) and HIMSS have extended their existing and long-standing relationship and, in collaboration with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) USA, will work together to foster the adoption of standards to enable the interoperability of health IT systems.
CDISC currently partners with IHE on standards development through the Quality, Research and Public Health domain, and demonstrates interoperability capabilities at the HIMSS Interoperability Showcases™. Now through a Memorandum of Understanding, HIMSS and CDISC will launch additional activities focused on improving workflow, so clinicians can conduct prospective medical research using EHRs, and thus, fully realize the important link between clinical research and patient care, paving the way for a learning health system.
Advancing efforts to solve the challenge of accessing and reusing data in EHRs and using it for research purposes within a single workflow, CDISC has collaborated with IHE to develop nine IHE integration profiles for clinical research through the CDISC Healthcare Link Initiative. Organisations that use these standards can eliminate the need for cumbersome research-related verification steps and redundant data entry, improving data quality and trustworthiness.
As outlined in the MOU, HIMSS will encourage the use of CDISC standards and EHR data for clinical research, and CDISC will support HIMSS strategic initiatives for advancing interoperability standards to achieve health IT integration. The two organisations will develop and disseminate information and standards documentation on the role of IHE profiles and CDISC standards in advancing clinical research.
